EpsilonXangent-(DOG)- wrote: Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:34 am
The Greek language, as we all know, is the root of every language (But is also the root of the Phoenician Language) and every word has its own root, whether Greek or Latin.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid this is incorrect.
The Greek language is part of the Indo-European family of languages.
Basically, there was a language spoken thousands and thousands of years ago which we today refer to as "Proto-Indo-European".
There are no written documents in this language, in fact it existed before writing altogether, but we can infer it existed and reconstruct it by looking at Indo-European languages today and looking at related words between them and seeing what sound changes must have happened and therefore reconstructing what the original language must have been.
This Proto-Indo-European language evolved into several different languages over the years as its speakers moved around Europe and Asia and their language changed. It is the ancestor of many of the languages in Europe and western Asia, but certainly not all languages in the world!
Here are some of its descendants:
- Proto-Italic, which evolved into Latin (among other extinct langauges), which itself evolved into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc
- Proto-Germanic, which itself evolved into English, Dutch, German, Frisian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, etc
- Proto-Slavic, which itself evolved into Bulgarian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, etc
- Proto-Baltic , which itself evolved into Lithuanian and Latvian
- Proto-Celtic, which itself evolved into Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Gaelic, Manx, etc
- Proto-Hellenic, whose only modern surviving descendant is Greek
- Proto-Indo-Aryan, which evolved into Sanskrit (among other extinct languages), which itself evolved into Hindustani, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Odia, Nepali, Sinhalese, etc
- The Iranian family, which itself evolved into Persian, Ossetian and Kurdish
- and many more smaller minor families
So English did not come from Greek or Latin, but they have a shared ancestor, Proto-Indo-European.
e.g. Proto-Indo-European *s(w)eḱs became "six" in English, "sechs" in German, "sex" in Latin, "hex" in Greek. None of these languages borrowed this word off each other, all these languages are merely descendants of Proto-Indo-European.
However, it certainly is true that English has borrowed explicit *words* from Latin and Greek. So we still say "six" the native English way, but we talk about "hexagons" and "hexagrams" and "hexadecimal" and stuff. This doesn't mean English *comes* from Greek, it just means we have borrowed some of its words.
As for Phoenician, Phoenician is a Semitic language, very similar to Hebrew.
It is part of the Semitic family, having descended from Proto-Semitic, which we can reconstruct by analysing all the Semitic languages and looking at their differences and how they must have evolved and reconstructing their common ancestor.
Here are some of its descendents:
- Proto-East-Semitic, which evolved into Akkadian and Eblaite, both extinct today
- Proto-Northwest-Semitic, which evolved into Aramaic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Punic, Ugaritic, etc
- Proto-Arabic, which evolved into Classical Arabic and from there all the modern spoken varieties of Arabic
- Proto-South-Semitic, which evolved into Ge'ez, Amharic, Mehri, etc
Proto-Semitic is actually part of a bigger family, the Afroasiatic family, which contains other languages such as Ancient Egyptian, Hausa, Berber, etc, which themselves come from a common ancestor Proto-Afroasiatic, but much less is known about Proto-Afroasiatic than, say, Proto-Semitic or Proto-Indo-European. The further back we trace these languages and try to reconstruct what they were originally like, the less sure we can be.
On the other hand, when you were talking about Greek and Phoenician, did you mean the *writing systems* as opposed to the *language itself*? That's a whole different story.
Ancient Bronze Age inscriptions in the Sinai peninsula from about the 18th century BCE show symbols simplified from Egyptian hieroglyphics, where the symbols are used to represent *sounds* rather than *words*. The writing system is an "Abjad", that is, the symbols are used to represent consonant, and the vowels are not written. We call this writing system Proto-Sinaitic, and it was used to write some ancient Northwest Semitic language.
By 1200 BCE, it had evolved into the Phoenician script that the Phoenicians used. The original Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had about 26 different letters, but the Phoenician script only had 22, since the Phoenicians didn't distinguish as many sounds as other Semtiic languages. The Phoenicians spread their alphabet all over the Mediterranean, and it caught on in many places. In particular, both the modern Hebrew alphabet and modern Arabic alphabet descended from versions of the Phoenician alphabet.
But most importantly, the Phoenicians introduced their alphabet to the Greeks. And the Greeks did something very interesting; they decided to use some of the letters (Alef, Ayin, He, Waw, etc) to represent *vowels* in and of themselves! Thus the Greeks invented the first "full alphabet", where letters represented both consonants and vowels. Over the years, the Greeks got rid of some letters they didn't use, and adding some extra letters that they needed to represent Greek sounds. They also decided at some point to start writing left to right rather than right to left. And from the Greek alphabet, variations of it in other places evolved into the Latin alphabet (that we use today) and the Cyrillic alphabet.
Phönizisch-5Sprachen.jpg
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